The Mystery of Flight 370

Like an episode out of the Twilight Zone, a Malaysian aircraft simply vanished without a trace leaving relatives scared and upset and investigators baffled while conspiracy theorists abound. I have listed a few conspiracy theories below. A lot of the information here I have taken from various articles and added my own special touch in the closing paragraph. 😉

Here’s what we do know: The flight disappeared on Friday night/Saturday morning en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. The plane was at cruising altitude (35,000 feet) and weather was more or less clear. Air traffic controllers in Vietnam say contact with the crew disappeared about 120 nautical miles east of the Malaysian town of Kota Bharu, and radar signals suggest the plane may have turned around before losing contact.

And yet, nearly three whole days later, there are still no signs of the jet or its passengers. And an oil slick spotted in the South China sea originally thought to be a clue turned out to be a false lead:

Two Italian passengers said to be aboard the flight turned out to be safe on the ground, when they told authorities that their passports had, in fact, been stolen earlier. Someone aboard the flight was said to be using them, one of whom resembled a famous soccer player:

Adding another wrinkle to the case, the Wall Street Journalreports that airliners “such as the Malaysian jet also carry emergency beacons to transmit the aircraft’s location in the event of a mishap so that rescue teams can reach the site.” These beacons, called emergency locator devices, are activated by impact on land or water, along with other emergency communications equipment. Malaysia’s aviation regulator said no signals were received from flight MH370’s beacon.

At 35,000 feet they’d be able to travel another ~100-120 miles (far enough to reach the coast of Vietnam). Depending on the speed of the aircraft, it would take at least 15-30 minutes to reach the earth (or sea), giving them ample time to make a distress call. Throw in this weird stuff with the fake passports, and now reports that the plane apparently had attempted to turn back, and this makes me think something pretty sudden and catastrophic must have happened, and mechanical and/or pilot error seems unlikely in this case.

wrote China’s Global Times in a scathing editorial. “If this is a terrorist attack, then the security check at the Kuala Lumpur airport and on the flight is questionable.”

Another, just as bizarre conspiracy theory suggests terrorists hijacked the plane, and have parked the plane intact in an abandoned hanger to use as “a weapon of mass destruction” in the future.”

Exactly why is this bizarre? Fact: the plane is missing. Fact: As your own story admits, there is “no trace” of it.

There is zero evidence to date that the airliner crashed. As detectives say, “When the impossible has been eliminated, what is left, however improbable, must be the truth.”

At this point, neither a crash nor a hijack are impossible and neither can be ruled out. So it is certainly not “bizarre” to hypothesize that the plane was hijacked and landed covertly. It would be a challenge, but not impossible.

Authorities have revealed one of the two men who used stolen passports to board the missing Malaysian Airlines plane looked like Mario Balotelli.

As it emerged an Iranian businessman named by Thai officials as Kazem Ali was understood to have booked the tickets for the two passengers using the stolen passports, the men who boarded the plane were said to have not been of ‘Asian appearance’.

Malaysia’s police chief was quoted by local media as saying that one of the men had been identified.

Civil aviation chief Azharuddin Abdul Rahman declined to confirm this, but said authorities were looking at the possibility the men were connected to a stolen passport syndicate.

A U.S. led search is also taking place hundreds of miles away on the other side of the Malaysian peninsula.

Malaysia’s civil aviation chief said today that the search for the Boeing 777 which vanished early Saturday morning had failed to find anything and that a sighting of a yellow object, which was earlier suspected to have been a life raft, was found to be a false alarm.

It has now also been confirmed an oil slick suspected of coming from the wreckage was not jet fuel.

Underlining the lack of hard information about the plane’s fate, a U.S. Navy P-3 aircraft capable of covering 1,500 sq miles every hour was sweeping the northern part of the Strait of Malacca, on the other side of the Malaysian peninsula from where the last contact with MH370 was made.

‘Our aircraft are able to clearly detect small debris in the water, but so far it has all been trash or wood,’ said U.S. 7th Fleet spokesman Commander William Marks in an emailed statement.

As Interpol investigates whether up to four passengers boarded the plane using stolen passports, it was today revealed five passengers checked on to the flight but did not board the plane. Their baggage was removed before it departed.
Other theories suggest a missile from North Korea downed the plane since there was a plane from China that was hit by a missile test two weeks ago as the missile was coming down from a test firing. Here are two theories I found interesting:

“This could be interesting if it turns out North Korea shot it down with a missile as an exercise of their unsophisticated and reckless weapons programs. Maybe then China will take out the NK boy dictator, while the rest of the world watches. I can’t think of any country that would come to his assistance.”

“There is always the possibility that someone on the plane was a target by the Chinese, and to get that one anonymously, they took out the whole plane. I wouldn’t put it past any government that supports the killing of innocents to do something like that.”

I was listening to John Batchelor on the radio the other night.There’s something about listening to talk radio in the dead of night with the lights out that makes it more intimnate and real. He was talking to a member of the NTSB and and asked him if he thought they would find the plane. His response was,”They’ll find it alright,but not in the condition they expect to find it.” That was pretty scary to here at that time.

Airplanes do not just disappear unless it was totally blown up by a missile and disintegrated so small pieces are not picked up on the radar as one theory suggested. So to add a little light on the subject, to paraphrase Rod Serling from his Twilight Zone episode “The Odyssey of Flight 33” To anyone in the Asian vicinity between Malaysia and China, if you hear engines that sound weak and troubled or lost, send up a flare, contact the FAA or nearest Air Traffic Control, do something,do anything for Flight 370 is trying to make it to its’ China destination.